Peter and Alice

by John Logan

  ALICE: Yes! Like I had another sister.

  PETER: Another rival?

  ALICE: No, a twin… A shadow.

  PETER: That’s it.

  ALICE: Even when I had forgotten her for weeks on end, years on end, I would turn, and even be a little surprised, for there she was.

  PETER PAN shadows PETER, almost like a game for him. Not for PETER though.

  PETER: Sometimes I tried to forget him. Always I tried to forget him. It was unremitting my whole life: “Peter Pan joins the Army”, “Peter Pan marries”, “Peter Pan opens publishing firm” … There was a time I drank terribly to forget him. I still do, there’s the truth. Or threw myself into love affairs, high drama, anything to forget the shadow. But, invariably, on the happiest of days, when he had been banished fully, I would catch a glimpse…in the shaving mirror…the shop window…behind me on the pavement.

  ALICE: Why did you try to banish him?

  He doesn’t answer.

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Wendy had looked forward to thrilling talks with Peter about old times, but new adventures had crowded the old ones from his mind.

  PETER PAN: Who’s Captain Hook?

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Don’t you remember how you killed him and saved all our lives?!

  PETER PAN: I forget them after I kill them.

  PETER: Because he makes me remember.

  Beat.

  This doesn’t come easily.

  PETER: When I look at my own children, Mrs. Hargreaves, I think…I think I know what childhood’s for. It’s to give us a bank of happy memories against future suffering. So when sadness comes, at least you can remember what it was to be happy.

  ARTHUR LLEWELYN DAVIES, PETER’s father, enters.

  His neck and jaw are in a horrible leather brace. He is dying. It is 1907.

  PETER: When it came, I was nine years old. Up until that time we were boys. After that time we were not.

  ARTHUR sits painfully.

  PETER PAN approaches, watches, almost impassive.

  PETER: My father… It was a cancer of the jaw and mouth. The word was never spoken in our house. It was a filthy word… Well, the operations began for this thing we didn’t say, and didn’t end until they had removed half his upper jaw and his palate and his cheekbone. For a time he had an artificial jaw, which was monstrous, he was so disfigured. I couldn’t look at him he frightened me so much, my father, more than Captain Hook, more than anything… He could barely speak. And every word had to be carefully chosen for the effort it cost him.

  BARRIE sits with ARTHUR. He’s very gentle with him.

  PETER: Barrie was magnificent those last days. The best he ever was. So kind to him, to us all… He paid for everything, you see. My father had lost his job. No one wants a barrister who can’t speak, who looks like that… There was no money and no prospects so in the end, my father was trapped…

  BARRIE: Don’t speak, Arthur. Let me tell you about the boys. George wrote to me from Eton that he wants to come for the weekend, but I wonder if —

  ARTHUR: Jim.

  BARRIE: Are you sure you should?

  ARTHUR holds up a hand, he must try to speak.

  This is agony:

  ARTHUR: There is no money… There is my wife… There are five boys.

  It is too hard to continue.

  BARRIE: Shall I try to find the words for you?

  ARTHUR nods.

  BARRIE: You’re thinking about them now, about the future. You wonder once you’ve gone what’ll become of them.

  ARTHUR nods.

  BARRIE: You look at me and you feel apprehension.

  ARTHUR nods.

  BARRIE: For you don’t think I’m a good man. For you think I’m closed and cold. For you think my sentimental attachment to your boys is unnatural in ways you can’t fathom, and maybe you could if you were a more learned fellow. But in your heart you feel it’s not right.

  ARTHUR nods.

  BARRIE: Still you hope that your boys are strong enough to stand on their own two feet and be the fine young men they are going to be, no matter what I do.

  ARTHUR nods.

  BARRIE: But now we’re up against it and we can’t do things by halves. This room will be closed and shuttered soon, and no one will come in… And what becomes of the boys? Who’s to pay for school? Who’s to keep up the house and staff? … Who’s to be their father now?

  ARTHUR nods.

  BARRIE: Are you giving them to me, Arthur?

  Beat.

  ARTHUR nods.

  BARRIE: Free and clear?

  ARTHUR nods.

  BARRIE: Would you say it?

  ARTHUR: Yes.

  BARRIE: Yes, what, Arthur? I need you to say it. I’m so sorry. I must hear it.

  ARTHUR: My boys…my boys…my boys…are yours.

  Beat.

  BARRIE: Peter, take your father out. Mark him now. That’s a good man there. You’ll rarely see his like, and never his better.

  PETER PAN leads ARTHUR away.

  PETER watches BARRIE.

  PETER: What did he feel? He had got exactly what he wanted, but he wasn’t triumphant. He wasn’t crowing like Peter Pan over the body of Hook. Maybe grown ups don’t crow.

  ALICE: What do you feel?

  PETER: Like I turned the first page of a book.

  ALICE: What’s the book called?

  PETER: The Morgue… I don’t run from the tears. I know that’s part of life. Not the crocodile tears of a fairy story, but genuine mourning… Anguish… Shall we go on? There’s more.

  ALICE: No. We needn’t.

  PETER: Alice in Wonderland is bolder.

  ALICE: She was younger.

  PETER: More resilient?

  ALICE: More uncaring.

  PETER PAN: Wendy, when you are sleeping in your silly bed you might be flying about with me!

  ALICE: Ah, the dear old days when I could fly!

  PETER PAN: Why can’t you fly now?

  ALICE: Because I am grown up, dearest. When people grow up they forget the way.

  PETER PAN: Why do they forget the way?

  ALICE strokes his hair gently.

  ALICE: Because they are no longer gay and innocent and heartless.

  PETER: (To BARRIE.) … If only that were true. I wasn’t heartless. I felt everything too much.

  BARRIE: You didn’t know yourself as boy.

  PETER: Of course I did.

  BARRIE: No, you remember yourself as you are now, only smaller.

  PETER: It was my life, I remember it.

  BARRIE: You weren’t the man you are.

  PETER: And I was heartless?

  PETER PAN: I’m not heartless.

  BARRIE: You were never one to cry.

  PETER: What does that mean?! What does that matter?!

  PETER PAN: Crying isn’t for pirates!

  PETER: Not like I didn’t feel anything.

  ALICE: But did you feel enough?

  PETER PAN: If I’m sad on Monday I never remember it on Tuesday, so why bother in the first place?

  PETER: God, it’s all I can do nowadays to keep from crying! Sometimes I think I’ll go mad from all the tears. Like a ridiculous little girl… (To ALICE.) … Like you, drowning in a pool of your own tears!

  ALICE: Not me. Alice.

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Me?

  BARRIE: This makes me very sad, Peter.

  PETER: Good, you deserve to be! I don’t mean that.

  BARRIE: At the grave of your father I looked over the faces, the five of you… And you, Peter, cheeks dry, so stoic… Beautiful and wounded.

  PETER: As beautiful and wounded as Michael?

  BARRIE doesn’t respond.

  PETER calms down.

  PETER: I wonder… Was I old enough to understand what death was? Things go away and don’t come back? That made no sense. Peter Pan always came back. A tap at the window and there he was. That’s what you taught me, Uncle Jim.

  BARRIE: Not a tear for your father.

  PETER: I’ve
cried about it since.

  BARRIE: Or your mother.

  Difficult beat.

  PETER explains to ALICE:

  PETER: It was only three years after my father died. My mother fainted one afternoon, right there in the parlor, her arm fell, I remember that, fell to the carpet and stretched out towards me. Her maid cut her stays so she could breathe. I don’t remember if the bone was iridescent, sorry. In any event, we forgot all about it… And then it happened again… It was cancer. Again.

  ALICE: I am so sorry…

  PETER: We were cursed. Like something from one of his melodramas: the family curse… At least she went quickly, with minimal disfigurement, which she would have found intolerable… And from then on, we were his.

  BARRIE: My boys.

  PETER: To exploit.

  PETER PAN: To immortalize!

  PETER: What child wants to be immortal?!

  ALICE: What child thinks he isn’t?

  PETER: Did you think you were going to live forever?

  ALICE: I still do.

  PETER smiles.

  ALICE: May I ask a personal question?

  PETER: You seem incapable of asking anything but.

  ALICE: Were you interfered with?

  PETER: Molested you mean? By Barrie? No, nothing like that… Not physically anyway.

  This strikes a chord with her.

  PETER: To be asked to reckon with things beyond your years? Is that to be molested? … To be fixated upon. To be kept too close.

  ALICE: To be forced into feelings you don’t understand. To be spoken to about emotions too strong for youth, too deep for childhood.

  PETER: To always disappoint because you don’t love back enough.

  PETER PAN: You love back as much as you can, that’s all.

  ALICE: To be the dream child in a dream you couldn’t possibly comprehend.

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Nor should you, because you’re only a child.

  ALICE: Being made to grow up too soon.

  PETER: Yes. That’s it. We’ve arrived.

  ALICE: Where?

  PETER: At our story… At Peter and Alice.

  ALICE: The love story?

  PETER: Partly… And partly that other book. The endlessly painful one with no happy ending.

  ALICE: Honestly! I gather it’s fashionable among young people to be dreadfully grim and depressive, you wear it as a badge of pride, but it’s rather a bore. Now I’ve had my share of difficulties, but I’ve always carried on with some hope.

  PETER: “Difficulties” you call it? That’s a comfortable euphemism, like finding another word for cancer.

  ALICE: Loss? Death? Is that what you want to hear?

  PETER: That’s what it is.

  ALICE: I’m not afraid of the words, but I don’t luxuriate in them.

  PETER: Is that what I do?

  ALICE: I think so.

  PETER: That’s just who I am.

  ALICE: It’s indulgent.

  PETER: Sorry.

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Stop arguing, it’s too boring!

  PETER PAN: Or start fighting at least! Who has a sword?

  PETER: (Continuing to ALICE.) All right then, let me ask you: these feelings of loss, do you remember the very first time you felt them? … And were you the same person after?

  ALICE: How can I remember something like that? It’s too vague.

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND approaches.

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Now she’s telling stories.

  PETER PAN: I love stories! Are there Indians?

  ALICE: I’m not telling stories.

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Of course you are! You remember perfectly.

  PETER PAN: And pirates and monsters and ships and battles and motorcars and balloon trips and undersea creatures and…!

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND: The darkroom, silly!

  This stops ALICE.

  CARROLL: Alice, keep still!

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Don’t you remember the darkroom?

  PETER: Tell me.

  ALICE: No.

  CARROLL: You must stay exactly as you are!

  PETER PAN: I love stories more than anything. Wendy told stories. And then she grew up.

  PETER: Tell me a story, Wendy.

  ALICE looks at him. So be it.

  ALICE: My sisters and I had gone to Reverend Dodgson’s studio to be photographed. This was not uncommon; we’d done it many times…

  CARROLL: You must hold still, Alice!

  ALICE poses for a picture. CARROLL is photographing her; a painstaking and elaborate process in 1863.

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND strikes an identical pose.

  CARROLL goes about the minutiae of his task.

  ALICE: I smell the chemicals still… Bromide and chloride dissolved to make the solution for the negative… Then like magic out comes the polished glass plate, which had to be perfectly clean, I’ve never seen anything cleaner, no dust, no imperfections, like the skin of a baby, fresh like youth, I don’t know like what, like innocence!

  PETER: (Laughs.) Oh God!

  ALICE: Don’t make me laugh, I’m supposed to be standing still… Then he carefully brushed the solution on the glass with a darling little sable brush I always coveted.

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND: (Re: sable brush.) Oh! It’s ravishing!

  CARROLL: Don’t move! Just a little longer.

  ALICE: Then he whisked the plate into the darkroom to dip it into the silver nitrate and then so gingerly back into the camera, like a surgeon those hands, those soft hands, then a final adjustment to the lens… (To CARROLL.) … I want to move.

  CARROLL: You’ll ruin it all.

  ALICE: Lorina’s making faces!

  CARROLL: She’s a very silly goose and you’re my Queen! Hold still, Queen Alice!

  ALICE: Then the moment! Hold your breath! Lens cap off. Time… stops.

  Everyone holds their breath.

  A few frozen moments.

  ALICE: Lens cap on! Move!

  CARROLL: Come with me, Alice! Double quick!

  CARROLL and ALICE hurry into the darkroom.

  Light almost disappears. They are now lit by the muted glow of the darkroom.

  ALICE: Into the darkroom! Shut the door. Like being lost at the bottom of the ocean, submerged in the deep dark.

  PETER PAN: With the sea creatures!

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Are you happy now?

  ALICE: The plate eased into the solution of acid and sulphate…back and forth, back and forth… What could be more thrilling than to see the negative gradually take shape, yourself gradually take shape?

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND: There you are… But in reverse, topsy-turvy, like everything in Wonderland. You and not you.

  ALICE: Even now, all these years later, the odor of certain chemicals brings me back there, to that room, on that day… This was the second and final time we were alone.

  CARROLL: Look, I’m starting to see you…

  ALICE: Can’t my sisters watch?

  CARROLL: The door’s shut now. We’d ruin everything… There’s your face emerging…

  ALICE: I don’t know that I like my expression. I seem a bit dour.

  CARROLL: You seem precisely you, precisely now. It’s this moment, captured forever, never changing.

  ALICE: Only it’s that moment back there and I’ve already changed.

  Beat.

  CARROLL continues to develop the picture.

  CARROLL: Do you think you’ll change much as you get older?

  ALICE: I should hope so. Who wants to remain the same forever?

  CARROLL: Do you think you’ll remember me?

  ALICE: I don’t know.

  CARROLL: Ah.

  ALICE: I’m bound to meet lots of people in my life, and some very memorable. I should think you would be one of the most memorable, but I can’t say for certain.

  CARROLL: It’s a fleeting time, this we have… When you’re like you are now.

  ALICE: You mean when I’m eleven?

  CARROLL: P-p-p-par
tly that.

  ALICE: Is that why you take so many photographs? So you won’t forget?

  CARROLL: I’ll never forget. But you will. You’ll move on to your adulthood of ways and means, of fancy dress balls and that bluff good fellow you’re going to marry, all the things that will make up the sum of your life. And a happy life it will be I know… But no reason to be sad for me. For I have this, don’t I?

  ALICE: But that’s not me… I know that’s not really me.

  Beat.

  He continues to work on the picture for a moment.

  CARROLL: You’re coming along nicely… You see how you are? … Never growing older, never growing wiser… Like in my heart.

  ALICE: (To PETER.) I didn’t understand fully.

  PETER: But you understood enough.

  CARROLL: I have a wish for my child-friends. Do you know what it is?

  ALICE: That we always stay like we are. But I don’t understand why.

  He stops.

  He considers whether to go on.

  CARROLL: In the place called Adulthood, there’s precious few golden afternoons. They’ve gone away to make way for other things like business and housekeeping and wanting everyone to be the same, just like you, all the lives lived in neat hedgerows, all excess banished, all joyous peculiarities excised. It’s grim and shabby. There are no Mad Hatters and there are no Cheshire Cats, for they can’t endure the suffering of the place.

  ALICE: Please stop…

  CARROLL: That’s the p-p-p-place called Adulthood… I’m there now. You’ll be there soon enough. And you’ll never leave… But here and now, in this room, and on this glass plate, and in the story I’m writing, you’ll never be there… And you’ll never be hurt. And you’ll never be heart-sick. And you’ll never be alone… You will be beloved.

  ALICE is near tears.

  ALICE: I have to go.

  CARROLL: It’ll ruin the picture.

  ALICE: May I go?

  Beat.

  CARROLL: Go, Alice.

  She quickly leaves the darkroom, moves away from CARROLL, trying to recover her equilibrium.

  PETER PAN: (Disappointed.) That was an awful story!

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Shhh.

  ALICE looks at CARROLL.

  ALICE: Poor wounded soul. Everlastingly tormenting himself about a sin that didn’t exist, but was completely true… I think the photographs were just a way to give him a safe framework to explore some unknown and dangerous landscape. He transformed his desires into paper and silver nitrate. What could be more innocuous?

  PETER: Perhaps we all do that when we grow up. Find safe ways to make dangerous trips.